Well, there's the venerable VESA2.0 standard which is implemented in all video cards produced since mid-late '90's, and you can take advantage of this by the vesa XFree86 driver.
The problem is that the VESA standard interface gives you just a framebuffer: there's no 2D or 3D acceleration and that is a real performance hit. (BTW, memory size has nothing to do with speed).
So, what you ask for is already done: you can use any videocard to display a (somewhat slow) X session.
But 2D is a solved problem: if you want that, you don't need an ATI 9700Pro or a GeForceFx, an old Matrox card will do it (the G100, G200 and G400 have very decent drivers, they are fast and the picture quality is superb). People want screaming fast 3D with all the latest features, and while there is a cutthroat race for this among the videocard manufacturers I don't expect really open source drivers.
(Oh, and there's the good old Macrovision stuff for TV outs, which is often cited as a reason why is it, that there are no open source support from the vendors for the TV out)
1. Processing power and memory is cheap (in money,space and power requirements and) and it's getting cheaper
2. It does not takes too much to understand one more format if that's not overcomplicated.
however
3. It takes considerable processing power and memory to _render_ the characters, esp. if you want them to be rendered nicely (non-fixed length, antialiased and a lot of attributes that has silly names that only typographers understand;) )
"The de facto standard is the Windows Latin-1 encoding"
There is no "Windows Latin-1" encoding, there's a Windows encoding - I think it's called codepage 1252 - that closly resembles ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1). But, for me, it's not an option, since I live in Latin-2 land and there are people that use cyrillic, arabic, far-eastern or other alphabets, so your proposed solution would work only for America and the western parts of Europe.
Plain text, however, usually means ASCII (as it is in the Gutenberg-project), in which case the only properly supported language is English.
"It's compact. Plain text files are smaller than HTML, PDF, RTF &c, sometimes by a lot"
A properly made HTML isn't any bigger than a plain text file (basic HTML tags are 3-5 chars long and you don't have to use them that often) but it has structure, has support for non-ASCII characters and even for pictures.
Please note my usage of the word "directly". Yes, chemistry tells our brain how the neurons fire, but it does not tell it how to play chess. So, you can say, intelligence in this definition is producing a sensible answer even when there is no clear and defined rule to produce that answer.
(I guess this definition attributes intelligence to neural networks: I am not sure if I really agree with that:)
I guess the line is where we do not have to directly tell the computer what to do.
And people who said that "Chess requires true human intelligence." meant that chess played like by a human requires human intelligence. And it does. But the deep searching performed by a chess-playing computer does not resemble that. It really does not require anything but following the steps carefully written down by its programmers - so yes, it's still not intelligence, it's just the execution of an algorithm.
It is not sin, it's just a surefire way of saying "there is no real content" OK, perhaps that's overgeneralization, since I can recall one (1) site that was all-flash yet it was worth looking at.
And yeah, search engines have a hard time dealing with flash only sites.
Gimme a break. Mozilla is a unique name which is very much recognized as a brand, but Firebird is not. There is/was a car, a game development company, a game, a raceway, a music publisher, a book publisher and a thousand million other things with that name. This protest is almost like if he complained about someone being called John, just because that is his name too. Childish.
Although I can see that it has the same pinouts, how do you connect it exactly? I mean, the connector on the CF card is smaller than the connector on a regular IDE cable and I am not sure where should the power go and what voltage. But connecting my CFs to the IDE bus sounds cool, so I would be glad if you could give some details:)
Try ESZF: with this setup you don't have to move your fingers around and - I believe - it gives better response times since each finger has a unique role.
"actively saying "You cannot use this if you're a bad guy" removes any doubts about the author's culpability and/or intentions"
Yeah, the same way like saying "I am here to bring you love and not to harm you" and then proceeding to shoot everyone in sight removes any doubt about one's intentions:)
"If they didn't explicitly say "Everyone but the following countries can use this software..." or "This software not to be used for military purposes", is that an omission of action which can land them in legal trouble?"
Yeah, I can see that:
- Hey, there's that great combat simulator on freshmeat, let's use it to train our troops!
- But Hussein, its license says that we can't use it.
- Oh, right, then I cancel the download...
Of course, that will not happen. It's the same thinking that leads to have questions like "Do you want to travel to the U.S. to commit terrorist acts?" on the U.S. visa form (no kidding). Do they REALLY expect the terrorists to say "yes"?
Well, wasn't that then just a simple, 'one-pass' expert system? It is nothing new altough perhaps the only really useful thing that AI research came up with. (And, of course, it has little to do with REAL AI:)
There's also a german firm, Pontis, coming out with an ogg capable player. (Note:.ogg support is in the works) It works with CompactFlash, Secure Digital and Multimedia Card memcards (and acts also as an USB card reader/storage device). It lacks the ability to record and the radio, but I for me these are not necessary. Also, it can be used as a handheld game console, although so far it seems there are two games for it:) I have seen it for 95 Euros, so it is not that expensive. The only thing keeping me back from buyin it is its size and weight (nearly 100g - though that's half what Neuros weighs) - I want to see an.ogg firmware for the Diva MP3 player (a sexy, 36 g device:) (Yes, I love the idea of memcard based players: I have a digital camera with CF cards so I don't want to spend on built-in memory (that can not be expanded) and CDs are too big and require lots of power to operate so there will never be really small and low-powered CD-based players)
Perhaps not that bogus. The privacy laws that we have here in Europe generally have the following fundamentals:
Nobody can collect your personal data unless they have either your consent or a law that specifically says that they may.
Your personal data may only be collected for a specific purpose.
Your personal data is to be stored until a well-defined point (preferably for as short time as possible).
You may look at the personal data stored about you and you may ask for correction/deletion.
He who has your personal data must make it sure that your data is not corrupted and not accessed by a third party.
Compare it to Google's practices and tell me if I (as a European) may have base for some concern about my rights having been violated. And come on, spyware is evil, and it is still evil even if it is made by Google.
Actually, I have run Quake on a Cyrix 6x86 PR-200 (it had a very slow CPU, I guess it had the same speed as a p133 or p166) under Linux. It was playable (although in rocket-duels there were noticable slowdowns). When tried to run it (I mean, glquake) on the same machine with VoodooII, it seemed to be blazing fast;) BTW, this machine is still in use - it mainly runs various DOS accounting software in Linux (via the DOS emulator) and there's no problem with its performance.
According to this comparison, it takes about 7:00 - 7:15 to decode 70:12 long audio on a PII-333, so I would guess that your server could - in theory - serve something like 8 streams at once (in practice with the IO overhead and with a security margin it should not be a problem to server those 2-3 streams at once).
On your site you hint about some incompatibility between the Pinnacle PCTV Pro and CMedia audio chips. Can you give some more info about it as I did not found anything on the Pinnacle support site.
Well, I have read the article. Text recognition helps just a little, personally I find typing easier. Fuzzy world searching in itselfs is an interesting problem if you consider an agglutinating languages (like my mother tongue), and since they did not say anything about it I would presume that they did not do it.
OK, so they have some database, that can store various files and you can search it - AFTER you tag it. And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits. I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with. Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem. So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this: 1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database 2. ??? 3. Have your whole life easily searchable
In MY jurisdiction it DOES (I am in Middle Europe) Also, it does not have to be downloaded from the internet - you can just copy it from a friend - and this is also a totally legal action here.
"Do you have permission from the copyright owner to copy these "Funny" Mpegs?" In MY jurisdiction I CAN use and copy any video/music file for my personal usage, and I believe this is the case in most of Europe. "Do you really believe that most people will want to use it for this purpose?" I don't know, but if they were building huge libraries of Hollywood shit for themselves, that would be also legal here, so, dear gentelman, you are either ignorant or you are really trolling. (My bet goes on the first)
"If this is so easy to do, why haven't the various consumer electronics manufacturers shipped DVD players with a hard drive on board?" It might be easy to connect a hard drive as a piece of hardware but it may be troublesome to get it integrated into the system - and embedded systems are more costly to develop than applications because of the higher expectations of quality (releasing patches is not an option) and the limitations of the hardware. The HDD itself is also expensive - I see DVD players that cost just as much as a 80GB HDD so adding a HDD would dramatically increase the player's price. And in the end it is hard to justify these costs - average consumers just could not make any use of the HDD and the geeky kind (e.g. myself:) rather builds his own HTPC.
Nice troll, modded highly. I highly doubt your statements and evenso more that extreme programming would do any good to an open source project. And don't even get me started on how complex projects were realized in the "early 90s" (and even earlier) that managed to be successfull without extreme programming. Sure, XP does have its place and it may work under certain conditions - but for a project where the developers are far away, do not know each other personally and don't have the spare time to work on the project at the exactly same time - it would do much more harm than good. (And finally I could cite Joel on extreme programming, but I don't because I suspect that you fully know that XP is not the holy grail of programming methodologies)
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Well, there's the venerable VESA2.0 standard which is implemented in all video cards produced since mid-late '90's, and you can take advantage of this by the vesa XFree86 driver.
The problem is that the VESA standard interface gives you just a framebuffer: there's no 2D or 3D acceleration and that is a real performance hit. (BTW, memory size has nothing to do with speed).
So, what you ask for is already done: you can use any videocard to display a (somewhat slow) X session.
But 2D is a solved problem: if you want that, you don't need an ATI 9700Pro or a GeForceFx, an old Matrox card will do it (the G100, G200 and G400 have very decent drivers, they are fast and the picture quality is superb). People want screaming fast 3D with all the latest features, and while there is a cutthroat race for this among the videocard manufacturers I don't expect really open source drivers.
(Oh, and there's the good old Macrovision stuff for TV outs, which is often cited as a reason why is it, that there are no open source support from the vendors for the TV out)
I think you are missing some things.
;) )
1. Processing power and memory is cheap (in money,space and power requirements and) and it's getting cheaper
2. It does not takes too much to understand one more format if that's not overcomplicated.
however
3. It takes considerable processing power and memory to _render_ the characters, esp. if you want them to be rendered nicely (non-fixed length, antialiased and a lot of attributes that has silly names that only typographers understand
"The de facto standard is the Windows Latin-1 encoding"
There is no "Windows Latin-1" encoding, there's a Windows encoding - I think it's called codepage 1252 - that closly resembles ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1). But, for me, it's not an option, since I live in Latin-2 land and there are people that use cyrillic, arabic, far-eastern or other alphabets, so your proposed solution would work only for America and the western parts of Europe.
Plain text, however, usually means ASCII (as it is in the Gutenberg-project), in which case the only properly supported language is English.
"It's compact. Plain text files are smaller than HTML, PDF, RTF &c, sometimes by a lot"
A properly made HTML isn't any bigger than a plain text file (basic HTML tags are 3-5 chars long and you don't have to use them that often) but it has structure, has support for non-ASCII characters and even for pictures.
Please note my usage of the word "directly". Yes, chemistry tells our brain how the neurons fire, but it does not tell it how to play chess. So, you can say, intelligence in this definition is producing a sensible answer even when there is no clear and defined rule to produce that answer.
:)
(I guess this definition attributes intelligence to neural networks: I am not sure if I really agree with that
I guess the line is where we do not have to directly tell the computer what to do.
And people who said that "Chess requires true human intelligence." meant that chess played like by a human requires human intelligence. And it does. But the deep searching performed by a chess-playing computer does not resemble that. It really does not require anything but following the steps carefully written down by its programmers - so yes, it's still not intelligence, it's just the execution of an algorithm.
Why is it a "major sin" that it is Flash only?
It is not sin, it's just a surefire way of saying "there is no real content" OK, perhaps that's overgeneralization, since I can recall one (1) site that was all-flash yet it was worth looking at.
And yeah, search engines have a hard time dealing with flash only sites.
Gimme a break.
Mozilla is a unique name which is very much recognized as a brand, but Firebird is not.
There is/was a car, a game development company, a game, a raceway, a music publisher, a book publisher and a thousand million other things with that name.
This protest is almost like if he complained about someone being called John, just because that is his name too. Childish.
Although I can see that it has the same pinouts, how do you connect it exactly? I mean, the connector on the CF card is smaller than the connector on a regular IDE cable and I am not sure where should the power go and what voltage. :)
But connecting my CFs to the IDE bus sounds cool, so I would be glad if you could give some details
Try ESZF: with this setup you don't have to move your fingers around and - I believe - it gives better response times since each finger has a unique role.
It seems like that you do not understand the "Microsoft Tax" term.
It is called so because you pay it EVEN if you do NOT want Windows (or DOS in the old days).
Your Linux/Windows comparsion clearly falls into the "Troll" category.
"actively saying "You cannot use this if you're a bad guy" removes any doubts about the author's culpability and/or intentions"
:)
Yeah, the same way like saying "I am here to bring you love and not to harm you" and then proceeding to shoot everyone in sight removes any doubt about one's intentions
"If they didn't explicitly say "Everyone but the following countries can use this software..." or "This software not to be used for military purposes", is that an omission of action which can land them in legal trouble?"
Yeah, I can see that:
- Hey, there's that great combat simulator on freshmeat, let's use it to train our troops!
- But Hussein, its license says that we can't use it.
- Oh, right, then I cancel the download...
Of course, that will not happen. It's the same thinking that leads to have questions like "Do you want to travel to the U.S. to commit terrorist acts?" on the U.S. visa form (no kidding). Do they REALLY expect the terrorists to say "yes"?
Well, wasn't that then just a simple, 'one-pass' expert system? It is nothing new altough perhaps the only really useful thing that AI research came up with. (And, of course, it has little to do with REAL AI :)
There's also a german firm, Pontis, coming out with an ogg capable player. (Note: .ogg support is in the works) :) .ogg firmware for the Diva MP3 player (a sexy, 36 g device :)
It works with CompactFlash, Secure Digital and Multimedia Card memcards (and acts also as an USB card reader/storage device). It lacks the ability to record and the radio, but I for me these are not necessary. Also, it can be used as a handheld game console, although so far it seems there are two games for it
I have seen it for 95 Euros, so it is not that expensive. The only thing keeping me back from buyin it is its size and weight (nearly 100g - though that's half what Neuros weighs) - I want to see an
(Yes, I love the idea of memcard based players: I have a digital camera with CF cards so I don't want to spend on built-in memory (that can not be expanded) and CDs are too big and require lots of power to operate so there will never be really small and low-powered CD-based players)
The privacy laws that we have here in Europe generally have the following fundamentals:
Compare it to Google's practices and tell me if I (as a European) may have base for some concern about my rights having been violated.
And come on, spyware is evil, and it is still evil even if it is made by Google.
Actually, I have run Quake on a Cyrix 6x86 PR-200 (it had a very slow CPU, I guess it had the same speed as a p133 or p166) under Linux. It was playable (although in rocket-duels there were noticable slowdowns). When tried to run it (I mean, glquake) on the same machine with VoodooII, it seemed to be blazing fast ;)
BTW, this machine is still in use - it mainly runs various DOS accounting software in Linux (via the DOS emulator) and there's no problem with its performance.
According to this comparison, it takes about 7:00 - 7:15 to decode 70:12 long audio on a PII-333, so I would guess that your server could - in theory - serve something like 8 streams at once (in practice with the IO overhead and with a security margin it should not be a problem to server those 2-3 streams at once).
On your site you hint about some incompatibility between the Pinnacle PCTV Pro and CMedia audio chips.
Can you give some more info about it as I did not found anything on the Pinnacle support site.
Well, I have read the article.
Text recognition helps just a little, personally I find typing easier.
Fuzzy world searching in itselfs is an interesting problem if you consider an agglutinating languages (like my mother tongue), and since they did not say anything about it I would presume that they did not do it.
OK, so they have some database, that can store various files and you can search it - AFTER you tag it.
And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits.
I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with.
Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem.
So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this:
1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database
2. ???
3. Have your whole life easily searchable
In MY jurisdiction it DOES (I am in Middle Europe)
Also, it does not have to be downloaded from the internet - you can just copy it from a friend - and this is also a totally legal action here.
"Do you have permission from the copyright owner to copy these "Funny" Mpegs?"
In MY jurisdiction I CAN use and copy any video/music file for my personal usage, and I believe this is the case in most of Europe.
"Do you really believe that most people will want to use it for this purpose?"
I don't know, but if they were building huge libraries of Hollywood shit for themselves, that would be also legal here, so, dear gentelman, you are either ignorant or you are really trolling. (My bet goes on the first)
"If this is so easy to do, why haven't the various consumer electronics manufacturers shipped DVD players with a hard drive on board?" :) rather builds his own HTPC.
It might be easy to connect a hard drive as a piece of hardware but it may be troublesome to get it integrated into the system - and embedded systems are more costly to develop than applications because of the higher expectations of quality (releasing patches is not an option) and the limitations of the hardware.
The HDD itself is also expensive - I see DVD players that cost just as much as a 80GB HDD so adding a HDD would dramatically increase the player's price.
And in the end it is hard to justify these costs - average consumers just could not make any use of the HDD and the geeky kind (e.g. myself
I may be totally off on the situation, but is seems to me that a T connector to which both the Tivo and your TV can connect would do it.
Nice troll, modded highly.
I highly doubt your statements and evenso more that extreme programming would do any good to an open source project.
And don't even get me started on how complex projects were realized in the "early 90s" (and even earlier) that managed to be successfull without extreme programming.
Sure, XP does have its place and it may work under certain conditions - but for a project where the developers are far away, do not know each other personally and don't have the spare time to work on the project at the exactly same time - it would do much more harm than good.
(And finally I could cite Joel on extreme programming, but I don't because I suspect that you fully know that XP is not the holy grail of programming methodologies)